Hand Pumps and Access To Clean Water
In November 2002, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights asserted that access to clean, safe water goes beyond the classification of water as an economic commodity. The committee stressed the fundamental right of sufficient access to clean water for both domestic and personal use. “The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity.” With this in mind, manufacturers of water pumps, like those produced by GOAZ Development in Malaysia, have a wide range of potential customers: governments, non- governmental organizations, women’s groups, community groups and other organizations of various types interested to developing access to groundwater.
However, there is controversy surrounding the sustainability of hand pumps, and the long-term gains from investing in them. A number of difficulties are associated with the use of hand pumps: these include cost, hygiene, maintenance, availability of spare parts, responsibility of upkeep, community involvement, technology, organization and education. Hand pumps, battered by intense use and conditions in rural areas, have often fallen apart. In addition, unobtainable spare parts impede maintenance.
Read more about this topic: Hand Pump
Famous quotes containing the words hand, pumps, access, clean and/or water:
“Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid of life.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.”
—Randall Jarrell (1914–1965)
“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)
“The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
...
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .
On water the Man-Fisher walks.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)